The monitoring and verification of inventory is a necessity in a wide variety of industries. Virtually every manufacturer who stores his goods in a warehouse for any period of time, must monitor and verify the type and quantity of goods in inventory. This process is not limited to those who make their own products, for instance, where a softdrink company uses outside bottlers to manufacture its product, the softdrink company must periodically visit the bottler to establish raw material usage and actual finished product inventory. Still further, finance companies who rely on the goods in the possession of a dealer as collateral must frequently establish the location and condition of such goods.
The financing of retail inventory, known as "floorplanning", is primarily "pay-as-sold" financing. With this technique, items are first purchased by a finance company and then shipped to a dealer or distributor. When an item is sold, the dealer pays the finance company the purchase amount plus the applicable interest charges. The finance company retains title to the inventory as collateral until the "loan" is paid off. As such, the finance company, to protect its interests, must verify the status of the items maintained by the dealer on a regular basis. To ensure that all financed items are at the dealer's location and in saleable condition, representatives of the finance company visit these locations to inspect the inventory. This inspection process is known as an "audit" or "floorcheck."
With most current systems and methods, when a representative of the finance company (an auditor) arrives at a dealer location, he begins the audit by performing a physical inventory of all financed items (FIG. 1 is a flow chart depicting this prior art work flow). This usually involves a check of the serial numbers of the items, but, in certain situations, may be simply a check of the items' model numbers. The status of each item is recorded, with particular attention paid to those items that are not found in inventory and are not yet sold (e.g., returned to manufacturer, in for repair, etc.). The results of the physical inventory are reconciled with the dealer against his records. An invoice is prepared for insurance premiums, overdue charges, interest charges and all items which have been sold. Money is collected from the dealer for the amount owed. The auditor leaves the dealer a copy of each inventory inspection sheet with the handwritten notations of each item's status. Lastly, a copy of the auditor's paperwork is sent to the finance company with the inventory results and remittances. (If the auditor is performing the work on a charge basis, he must prepare a bill to assess the proper party for the expense of the audit.)
Typically, the inventory is performed from an Inspection Checklist which is produced by one of the finance company's computers and mailed to the auditor. In many cases, a week's worth of checklists are prepared at once and mailed together to the auditor. Because of workload, mail delays, charge based audits and other factors, a checklist may be as many as 7 to 10 days old at the beginning of the inventory. Since dealers are obligated to pay the finance company for an item as soon as it is sold and since new financed inventory items are continually added, the auditor must contact the finance company just prior to the audit to manually update the checklist to determine exactly which items should be examined during the inventory. This procedure generally requires from five to twenty five minutes on a telephone at the dealer's place of business, usually at long distance rates.
Sometimes, after the checklist has been updated, the sequence of the items on the checklist is not appropriate to smooth conduct of an inventory. In such cases, the auditor will prepare a new handwritten checklist to facilitate the inventory procedure. This is a time consuming task.
As the inventory is taken, the auditor marks codes on the checklist to identify the status of the various items (e.g., .check mark.=serial number checked, PD=Paid off, DEM=demo, etc.). He searches for and attempts to determine the status-of every item on the list. If the auditor does not find an item which is on the checklist, no status is indicated and the item must be reconciled with the dealer unless previously paid off.
When the physical inventory is complete, all items not found, which have not been paid off, are noted. These items require reconciliation with the dealer's records. In many audits the list of items is so large that the auditor must spend a significant amount of time reviewing the items on the checklist to ensure that all applicable items are reconciled with the dealer.
Frequently, the reconciliation process requires more time than the physical inventory. Because of the intense concentration involved, the size of the inventory and the number of handwritten comments and codes, items that have already been sold may be missed by the auditor. In such situations, no collection is made for these items and the finance company is subject to financial loss.
After the reconciliation, the auditor prepares an invoice indicating the amount to be paid by the dealer. Data items (e.g., serial numbers, item numbers, model numbers and amount due) are copied from the checklist to an invoice. The amount owed by the dealer is totalled from: (1) the items which have been sold but not yet paid off; (2) outstanding charges; (3) interest payments; and (4) insurance premiums. The auditor receives payment from the dealer to resolve the total amount owed.
For audits which are on a charge basis, the auditor must record his time as well as other inventory information on a form. The form is sent to the finance company's authorizing office, the cost of the audit is calculated and a bill is sent out. This task is particularly onerous if the audit involves several clients. A motorcycle dealer, for instance, could sell products made by four different manufacturers and managed (financed) by four different clients (finance companies). In such a case, the cost to each client is calculated based on a percentage of the number of items managed by the client as compared to the total number of items in the inventory. All data from the audit is then sent to the authorizing office.
Since a significant number of auditors do not work near a finance company office, the paperwork is either mailed or delivered overnight by courier. When the paperwork is received, the auditor's Inspection Checklist is analyzed, and the information entered into an office computer (this could be the finance company's mainframe computer, but could also be any other computer which uploads information to the mainframe). Since the data is entered from the comments and handwritten codes provided on the auditor's checklist, numerous errors tend to occur. Often, significant sums received from dealers are placed in suspense, that is, not applied to any account, because the checklist and invoice are either unreadable or incorrect. This results in financial loss to the finance company and damage to customer goodwill.
When a company employs hundreds of auditors who perform over 1,000 audits daily, the auditing process represents a significant cost of doing business. As such, every extra step or cost incurred by an individual auditor is multiplied so that inefficiency becomes extremely expensive.
As described above, a number of problems are inherent in the present (prior art) audit system: inventory checklists are frequently out of date at the time of the audit; (2) the auditor and a finance company representative have to update the checklist on the phone involving a large expenditure of time and (usually) long distance charges; (3) auditors spend a lot of time manually preparing inventory worksheets, invoices, and other documentation; (4) reconciliation based on handwritten notations on checklists requires too much time; (5) the handwriting of auditors is frequently unreadable, leading to inaccurate computer input and loss of financial remuneration; (6) involvement of the finance company offices in the audit process is intensive and time consuming; and (7) mail and overnight shipping charges constitute a large expense.